The present invention teaches a chicken harvesting and cooping apparatus supported on a vehicle by which the apparatus can be maneuvered inside of a chicken house as well as down a highway. It should be understood that throughout this disclosure the term "chicken", as used herein, is intended to include chickens, turkeys and ducks, and any other commercially grown fowl that advantageously can be gathered or harvested by the present invention. The present invention sets forth both method and apparatus for translocating chickens from a chicken house or chicken growing area into commercial chicken coops.
In the prior art, it is common practice for a fork lift to bring to the chicken cooping machine an empty coop which must be placed on the ground temporarily while a filled coop is removed from the machine. To prevent the machine being idle during the subsequent operation, the filled coop is temporarily set down, then the empty coop is again picked up and set on the machine; and, thereafter, the full coop is again picked up and loaded onto a truck. Then the forklift brings another empty coop to the cooping machine as the operation is repeated in the before described time consuming manner.
This time consuming duplication of effort is expensive because all of the extra maneuvering slows down the main operation of gathering and cooping the chickens with the chicken cooping machine. Hence loading and unloading the empty and filled coops is a bottle-neck that reduces the efficiency of prior art chicken cooping machines.
The legal road width usually limits the width of most vehicles to 8 or 8.5 feet which prevents most any chicken cooping machine to be built with adequate width for simultaneously accommodating both a full and an empty chicken coop, unless the coop support is elevated above the support wheels of the cooping machine. This necessitates fabricating the cooping machine at an excessive elevation. Therefore simultaneously accommodating and manipulating both an empty and a full coop in conjunction with a chicken cooping machine is not found in the prior art.
Another factor that limits the width of a cooping machine is the width of the entrance into the chicken house, which sometime is inadequate for admitting a chicken gathering machine having a width adequate for simultaneously handling both an empty coop and a full coop.
The standard commercial chicken coop is a multi-tiered coop, five tiers high, with each tier being divided into three individual compartments. The compartments of each tier is provided with horizontal, over-the-center, spring loaded doors for accepting and discharging chickens therethrough. Transferring a uniform weight of chickens into the individual compartments of a tier is not always possible with prior art machines, and often too many chickens are packed into one compartment, while too few are caged in another. This results in losses during hot weather. Therefore it is desirable to be able to coop chickens in such a manner that a predetermined number of chickens is automatically translocated into each of the individual compartments of a standard coop.
Another drawback of a chicken cooping machine is the difficulty of properly arranging the standard commercial multi-tiered coop in proper aligned relationship respective to the discharge of the chicken cooping machine. In addition to the difficulty of properly aligning the horizontally disposed compartments of the vertically spaced tiers with the chicken discharge of the cooping machine, it is also necessary to sequentially align each of the individual vertically spaced tiers with the chicken discharge so that each compartment of each tier is suitably filled. This is especially difficult to achieve because the large coop must first be moved into a proper position where it can be engaged by the tilting apparatus, where it is then tilted away from a vertical plane in order to assume an angle that is sufficient for the chickens introduced through the coop entrance to gravitate towards the back of the individual compartments, thereby leaving room for additional chickens.
One of the most important subcombinations of this invention is the apparatus for engaging and moving the chickens that are on the floor of the chicken house, and translocating the caught chickens to another part of the cooping machine. This is accomplished by a boom that extends from the chicken cooping machine, and has a gathering head supported at the far end thereof, hereinafter referred to as the gathering end.
The present invention, as will be appreciated by those skilled in the art after studying this disclosure, provides improvements over all known prior art chicken gathering and cooping apparatus by sequentially moving chickens from a flock of chickens onto a conveyor means where the chickens are transported to another part of the apparatus where they are cooped. By the present invention it is possible to sequentially gather chickens in either of one or two parallel streams, thereby doubling the flow of chickens thereinto; or, reducing the flow of chickens, as may be desired, all of which increases the utility of the cooping apparatus. This is achieved by an improved gathering head which catches and deposits the caught chickens onto a moving conveyor in a new, unobvious, and improved manner.
The present invention overcomes many other problems and drawbacks associated with the prior art by the provision of an improved gathering head in combination with an improved apparatus for the discharge of chickens into the individual compartments of a tier of a chicken coop, and, also improvements in the handling of the filled and empty coops. Both method and apparatus by which these desirable and novel attributes are realized are the subject of the present invention.